bell hooks
bell hooks
American author, feminist, and social activist whose real name is Gloria Jean Watkins. She wrote "Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism".
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth25 September 1952
CityHopkinsville, KY
CountryUnited States of America
life letting-go moving
It's interesting--the way in which one has to balance life--because you have to know when to let go and when to pull back.... There's always some liminal (as opposed to subliminal) space in between which is harder to inhabit because it never feels as safe as moving from one extreme to another.
growing-up home night
It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cause you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history.
photography wall home
When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images.
struggle people mind
Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.
sex desire language
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.
leadership wisdom tired
I'm tired of the naked, raped, beaten black woman body. I want to see an image of black femaleness that alters our universe in some way.
photography memories mean
For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.
teaching school white
Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as "not black enough." ...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.
meaningful knowing love-relationship
Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.
taken way needs
... we need to interrogate "reverence," for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.
cutting practice class
Yearning is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice.
struggle moving long
Today masses of black women in the U.S. refuse to acknowledge that they have much to gain by feminist struggle. They fear feminism. They have stood in place so long that they are afraid to move. They fear change. They fear losing what little they have.
commitment space feminist
... feminist solidarity rooted in a commitment to progressive politics must include a space for rigorous critique, for dissent, orwe are doomed to reproduce in progressive communities the very forms of domination we seek to oppose.
taken class african-american
Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.